Author: Elizabeth Wood

A couple years ago one of my Soviet history students, Jessy Mwarage, said he wanted to do a bit of extra work at the opening of the semester, so I gave him some Russian census data from 1897 to play with. He turned the data into very elegant pie charts.  

I should add one caveat. I’m not absolutely positive about the quality of the data, but I think it’s reasonably good. Above all, it will give students a sense of the diversity of the population in the Russian Empire.

Russian Census Data, 1897

Total population:  125,640,021 people
Sex:  50.2 % female;  49.8 % male
Urban:   16,828,395 (13.4%);   Rural:  108,811,626 (86.6%)
Literacy:   29.3% of males;  13.1% of females were literate
 
Nationalities (as determined by language)

Russians:  56 million (44%)

Ukrainians:  22 million (17%)

Poles:  8 million (6%)

Belarusians (a.k.a. White Russians):  6 million (5%)

Jews (Yiddish speaking): 5 million (4%)

Kirghiz = 4million (3%)

Tatars = 3.7 million Tatars (3%)

Georgians, Germans, Latvians, Lithuanians, Moldovians: 1-2 million each (1.6%)

 
 

 
 
Religions

• Russian Orthodox:   69.34%
• Muslims:   11.07%
• Roman Catholics:   9.13%
• Jews:   4.15%
• Lutherans:   2.84%
• Old Believers and others split from Russian Orthodox:   1.75%
• Armenian Gregorians & Armenian Catholics:   0.97%
• Buddhists, lamaists:   0.34%
• Other Protestants:   0.15%

 

 
 

Social Groups

Peasants and Cossacks:                      99.8 million (79.4% of the total population)

Towndwellers:                                     13.4 million (10.7%)

Total lower classes:  113.2 million (90.1%)

Merchants, honored citizens:             0.6 million (0.5%)

Church estate:                                       0.6 million (0.5%)

Nobility:                                                  1.85 million (1.5%)

National minorities [inorodtsy] incl. Jews:      8.3 million (6.6%)

Foreigners:                                            0.6 million (0.5%)

 

 

 

 
Source of Income of Main Breadwinner

Agriculture  (incl. livestock prod., fishing, forestry):  74.57%

Manufacturing & crafts (esp. sewing, construction, metal, textiles, woodworking):  9.34%

Servants and daily manual workers:   4.61%

Commerce:   3.99%

Transport and communications (nearly one half were horse and cart drivers)  1.55%

Army and navy:   .99%

Public administration (state & local authorities):   .75%

Living on capital income:   .72%

Religious institutions (including clerks & janitors):   .63%

Medicine, education, science, literature, and legal practice:  .61%

Mining:   .44%

Others:    1.8%

 

 

 
 
Largest Cities of the Russian Empire:

• Saint-Petersburg — 1,264,900
• Moscow — 1,038,600
• Warsaw (now Poland) — 626,000
• Odessa — 403,800
• Łódź (now Poland)— 314,000
• Riga (Latvia) — 282,200
• Kiev (Ukraine) — 247,700
• Kharkov (Ukraine) — 174,000
• Tiflis (Tbilisi, Georgia) — 159,600
• Wilno (Vilnius, Lithuania) — 154,500
• Saratov — 137,100
• Kazan — 130,000
• Rostov-on-Don — 119,500
• Tula — 114,700
• Astrakhan — 112,900
• Katerynoslav (Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine) — 112,800
• Baku (Azerbaidjan)— 111,900
• Kishinev (Chişinău, Moldova) — 108,500
• Helsinki (Finland) — 93,000
• Minsk (Belarus) — 90,900

 

Data from Wikipedia (English and Russian) and other sources.   Pie charts by Jessy Mwarage.